


Planetside

by lynndyre



Category: The Terror (TV 2018)
Genre: Gen, IN SPACE!, M/M, Slashy feelings, slightly psychic Crozier
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-25
Updated: 2019-12-25
Packaged: 2021-02-26 02:55:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,532
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21906316
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lynndyre/pseuds/lynndyre
Summary: --We have gone planetside. With artificial gravity turned off, and life support soon to follow, it is hoped the ship will maintain orbit, and this beacon continue to broadcast.
Comments: 9
Kudos: 44
Collections: Yuletide 2019





	Planetside

**Author's Note:**

  * For [simplyirenic](https://archiveofourown.org/users/simplyirenic/gifts).



_\--Look for us on the planet below. ...If you do not find us, do not remain. This area of space is unstable and unpredictable. Beware of strange ionic activity. Solar activity. Psyionic phenomena. Proceed with all due caution._

The SOS beacon is set to broadcast for as long as the Terror remains in orbit. With artificial gravity turned off, and life support soon to follow, it is to be hoped the ship will maintain orbit. (As Erebus, with her damaged sublight engines, had not. Erebus had burned so bright, falling in shining pieces like the worst fireworks display ever created. Too many bulkheads locked down, too many men lost, too much of everything, gone into freefall and fire.)

In the deserted ready room, two men are finalizing the log that will remain onboard Terror. Neither of them are her captain.

_The crew roster has been updated to the moment of our departure. Chief NavigatorThomas Blanky has chosen to disembark with the rest, allowing all aboard to proceed to the planet below and essential power drains on the ship to be much reduced, despite the interruption to necessary regenerative work on his lower leg. Recommend commendation, it is unknown if delayed regenerative attempts would have any possibility of success._

A huff. "If we get off the damn planet, then I'll worry about growing a new leg. Keep to the facts, sir."

"James. Please."

"James then. You've had enough practice writing up these stories for the Admiralty."

"Yes, but usually in rather the other direction. I'm afraid I'm better practiced at the fleshing out side of storytelling than the cutting away."

James Fitzjames would swear they have not been incompetent, but any factual telling of it- They have lost propulsion. Men. Stores. An entire starship. They are beginning to lose health and sanity. None of the strange recordings Captain Franklin were certain indicated a passable wormhole have proven anything close, and so much loss chasing after nothing- incompetence is the kindest possible word to be applied.

_It is possible the forces that affected our ships in space are not so active within the atmosphere. Translators appear to function, with modification, but we have had little luck in gaining specific information from the local inhabitants, who are descended from early generation-ship colonists. We hope to learn more on the surface._

"A resoundingly hopeful note."

Fiztjames snorts. "Captain Crozier will wish to add his own log. But Mr Blanky, I would ask you to help me understand something. I've read Captain Ross's reports, and I had always received the impression a high psy rating was considered a good thing for a captain to possess."

Blanky angles his head, assessing. Captain Franklin's psy-null status sits between them mutually unspoken. "It can be. If it's used right. And if it works right. Captain Ross had some problems with the former. Projecting confidence and command is useful for charisma, trying to will desperate men into line is something else."

Fitzjames' mouth works, as though rolling that truth over on his tongue.

"Captain Crozier- "

Fitzjames holds up his hand. "Perhaps he'll tell me." The load of painful hope and frustrated honor in him is like a small boy sitting on his hands, and it makes Blanky nearly smile.

"Perhaps he will."

Francis Crozier is only awake enough to abandon his own ship by the skin of his teeth. Psy suppressants, overused, wear off like a slow-clearing fog until he can feel clarity seeping in beside the pain and withdrawal. His mind is more open than he's left it in years, and pieces of possible futures, heavy-footed and bear-shaped, are starting to pace in his dreams.

He touches the Terror farewell, and she echoes back with impressions left by decade on decade of hundreds of lives.

The beacon of the Terror is set. It begins to broadcast, and the shutdown of essential systems begins, one by one. And then there is nothing but the planet below.

If the SOS beacon does manage to reach anyone, Crozier hopes it's Captain Ross, or the Hudson's Bay starbase, or anyone with the sense God gave a space flea, not to take the risks that Franklin did. Or make any of the mistakes they've all made, before then and since. 

Even landfall does not succeed as planned. The remaining crew and supplies overcrowd Terror's three shuttlecraft, and when the second begins to lose altitude they are forced to land much higher north than planned, and far from the coast. In the night, shuttlecraft 3 is tampered with, and the fuel cell ruptures. Cornelius Hickey's body is the only one identifiable, and Crozier curses his dreams even as he swallows down something far too close to relief.

Shuttlecraft 1 Crozier sends out with a small party to go ahead, to map out the route they'll need to take in stages now. But the shuttlecraft party stops radioing in after only two days, and at the end of a week Francis feels the bear just before it strikes, utterly alien and _angry_. Energy weapons make it angrier.

They're abandoning the initial base camp now, moving towards, based on limited mapping telemetry and Blanky's feel for the orientation, what should be a more temperate area. The early colonists made it here, have survived here ever since, but what should be encouraging seems merely impossible. It is excruciatingly slow going. None of them were trained for this, and many of the crew resent it- and the survival gear from the ships is made for setting up stationary field outposts, never for breaking it all down and moving day by day. The portable supplies amount to little more than carry packs and metallic heat-retention blankets, which offer neither security nor comfort. 

The creeping instability that plagues the crew, which Francis would dearly love to blame on space and circumstance, is likely their own doing. Government and corporate designers, outsorcing to the lowest bidder to outfit the ships, and replicators that instead of removing heavy metals have been adding them every time the ingredient matrix glitches. Science officer Goodsir is near the top of Crozier's mental list of commendations, too, though their pre-made food supply is scant. And nothing they've yet found planetside has proven edible. Even allowing for those who have died, they are two ships of men surviving on part of a single ship's stores. And Francis is watching them fade by the day. Even those he selfishly most wants to keep safe.

Thomas Blanky stood on that observation deck on Crozier's orders, ordered his own regen stopped, and came down to walk in the dirt with the rest of them on a leg of printed polycarbon matrix, and it had splintered in the bear's teeth when the alien reshaped inside their camp perimeter. His new leg was sculpted from repurposed shelter construction supplies, and gave him a gait like a pirate.

Fitzjames leans close as if in conference, sporadically as they walk, just discreet enough in offering his arm that Thomas will take it for a stretch. But he is fading too. His smiles are as thin and brittle as his hair. There are vitamin injections in the reserve medical supplies, but not enough. The landscape is empty, and emptying all of them out to cross it. Mr Goodsir has theories about the planet, and the creature, and the land, but it doesn't take science to tell it doesn't want them here.

And yet for all that, it is not without beauty, this terrible place. The ground where they were forced to set down is by turns rock and ice and open empty soil, where even the alien plants do not grow, but the planetside dawn is a slow thing, planetary day longer than earth, and the atmospheric composition such that it stretches out above them in ribbons and twists of glowing light, in every colour in the world, and some beyond. 

James beside him tilts his face up into the light as if to drink it in, and once Francis would have insulted him for seeming to feed on beauty. Now he rather wishes it were true. 

The lights dance and dance and dance. For a stretch, Francis and James take the advanced scout position, and Francis walks a step ahead, so as not to watch the sky paint James in all its colours.

"You should know that I'm a fraud."

By the end of James' poor impassioned speech, Francis almost wants to laugh. Never at his secrets- though how could he think a colony-bred man like Francis would care if his blood wasn't pure earth-human?- but at the relief of a thing that's nagged at him as long as he's known James Fitzjames; the damnable elevated psy certainty that he was lying about something. 

He's never been so good at broadcasting as receiving (more than he wants to, always, unless he takes things to blot it out) but whatever mess of good feeling he has inside him he pushes outwards, into his grip on James' shoulders. From the shine in his eyes and the strength of his return grip, some of it gets through.

Light years distant, Captain Ross receives the first ping of an SOS.


End file.
